The mobility of many businesses requires that equipment, including office-type furniture, be transported about so as to be available for use at various job sites. This increased demand for mobility and particularly the capability of providing a reasonably equipped small office or workstation which can be easily set up or taken down, and safely and easily transported, is a need which is not fulfilled by office furniture products of the type currently available. In particular, most conventional office furniture products are not sufficiently portable or sufficiently compact, and are not easily and compactly storable so as to facilitate quick set up and take down, so as to permit efficient transport from site to site as required by modern commercial needs.
While various portable and/or knock down furniture components have been developed, including various collections of components which attempt to function as a portable office and are storable within an enclosure, nevertheless past developments in this respect for the most part have not been commercially accepted on any significant scale. While the exact reasons for same is not known, nevertheless it is believed that prior attempts at providing a portable office have been deficient with respect to the overall collection and arrangement of products and functions provided by the portable office, and more significantly a lack of easy transportability and durability, and an inability to maximize the number of structures and functions which can be accommodated within and provided by the portable office.
The present invention relates to an improved transportable workstation which is storable within a transportable enclosure, which enclosure when opened functions as part of the workstation in terms of supporting office equipment and at the same time permitting other office fixtures as stored in the enclosure to be opened outwardly or extended from the open enclosure to define an officelike workstation. In this improved transportable workstation, the enclosure in particular incorporates an openable door which functions as part of the open workstation, and the door includes an adjustable floor-engaging roller adjacent the free edge thereof for providing load-bearing support when in the open position, thereby enabling both the main enclosure and the door to be properly supported from the floor when in the open position, and at the same time enabling the overall enclosure to be of minimum structure and weight so as to maximize the interior storage space and at the same time minimize overall weight to facilitate transportability.
The transportable workstation or office of this invention includes a trunklike enclosure having an upright main storage cabinet, which cabinet is of a boxlike construction which is open on one vertical face thereof, and is provided with a closeable door or cover hinged along one vertical edge thereof, the door itself having a shallow storage compartment therein. The enclosure, when closed, permits storage of a small table in a collapsed upright position, and the enclosure also mounts therein other desirable office fixtures such as a shelf, a pull-out drawer, a marker and/or tack board, and the like. The overall enclosure including specifically the main boxlike cabinet is of minimal structural complexity and size to minimize weight and optimize the interior storage compartments. The door, adjacent the lower free edge thereof, is provided with a vertically adjustable caster, preferably with a brake thereon, which can be easily manually adjusted downwardly for load-bearing engagement with the floor when the door is in an open position to permit proper overall alignment of the door and cabinet when in an open position to define the workstation.
Other objects and purposes of the invention will be apparent to persons familiar with structures of this general type upon reading the following specification and inspecting the accompanying drawings.